


The Witch

by moon_hotel



Category: Bokosuka Wars (game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-24
Updated: 2012-07-24
Packaged: 2017-11-10 14:30:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/467346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moon_hotel/pseuds/moon_hotel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Suren's kingdom is invaded by Ogereth's monstrous forces, he flees to a neighboring city and is taught magic by a mysterious, cantankerous witch. (Based off of the Nintendo Virtual Console page's description of the plot for Bokosuka Wars.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Witch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [evilgiegue](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=evilgiegue).



Ogereth's forces stormed through Suren's kingdom like a hurricane, razing and enchanting all that they saw. As he dragged himself away from the battlefield, Suren called himself a fool for fighting the battle in the first place. But there had been no alternative; the soldiers under his ranks had stood silently before the approaching tide, trusting in nothing but their faiths and their king. Perhaps some of them had silently been wishing for the opportunity to surrender, but they had stood stock still, as puppets under their master.

They had sprung to life as the demons drew closer, their white armor and blue pennants flashing in the light, and Suren himself had fought as valiantly as he could, slicing down monsters so numerous that they became a blur in his mind. But in the most terrible, bloodless battle he'd seen, his soldiers had disappeared one by one, twisted into great trees and craggy rocks that spoke no words and held no arms. The monsters laughed.

"You can't eat trees," he remembered Ogereth bellowing, in a voice that emanated from the depths of his vast blue belly, "but let them stand as a monument to your foolishness, Suren!"

Suren waited to die. He did not. The monsters moved not towards him, or towards anything, but only laughed.

As he limped away from what used to be his kingdom, bracing himself on the staff of a torn and tattered royal flag, he began to smell smoke, and made the mistake of glancing behind him. In their victory, Ogereth's monsters had built an enormous pyre, stripping the branches from some of the trees.

 

He traveled for days. Though he was somewhat thin, he was also a strong and durable man, and he walked along the dusty trails until he came to a neighboring city.

"It is I, King Suren, beaten and disgraced," he cried, but the townspeople looked past him as if he had never existed. With horror, he spoke to them, tugged on their clothes, waved his pennant in the square, but his words fell on ears that never heard them. "This must be some foul spell of Ogereth's," he thought, "or otherwise these people are nothing but statues walking over the earth."

The weight of despair pressed down upon his shoulders, so heavy that he dragged himself along the ground, from avenue to avenue, knocking vainly at every door that crossed his path. It was only when he was faint and exhausted that heard one open, and as he slumped to the ground, he felt a pair of bony hands pull him over the hearth.

"Poor fool," came a reedy woman's voice, as if from somewhere very far away. "What cursed fool be ye, to be searching for help in this town of apathy and despair?"

"I am the king of the country to the north," Suren said, or tried to say--but the sound that came out of his mouth must have approximated it well enough, for the woman nodded as she hoisted him into a chair. "The monstrous demon Ogereth--"

"Ah, Ogereth, that brat! Is he at it again, playing king and soldier?" the woman brayed, working off Suren's armor as if she were disassembling a toy. He stared at her in shock, his vision clearing: she was a spindly woman, with a large head of frizzy, chaotic hair. She must have been at least sixty or seventy years old, but she moved with the quick, jerking motions of a large insect. "Ah, I'm sorry for the trouble he be causin' ye."

"Excuse me?" Suren said, astounded.

"Ah, see--" the woman explained, hemming and hawing as she took off Suren's boots. "The wicked blue-bellied creature, that Ogereth, yes? I was his nanny, long ago, in the kingdom of the monsters. Retired now, in this town where nobody bothers me," she snickered, as she put the boots aside and then trundled off towards her kitchen. "Ah, but Ogereth was a devilish little creature, even then!"

"You're--his _nanny?"_

"Aye!" she responded, coming back into the room with a tub of water. She set it at the foot of the chair and placed Suren's aching feet in it up to the ankles. "I raised him meself, I did, taught him all the magic he knows. Just parlor tricks, really--"

"Taught him!" Suren exclaimed, shooting up straight in the chair and fumbling for his sword. "Parlor tricks! Those 'parlor tricks' cost me my kingdom, vile creature!"

"Ah, stop your bellyachin'!" the witch shot back, and Suren flopped back in the chair as if he'd been hit. "I know, I know, he invaded your kingdom and turned your army into a lovely little garden, didn't he? Don't you worry your cute little helmet over it," she chuckled, reaching over to give Suren a patronizing pat on the head. "Yer friends and family be safe, majesty, for now."

She explained: being the brilliant nanny she was, she had the foresight to teach her demon prodigy only non-lethal magic, that is, the art of transformation without pain. "Your soldiers are sleeping in those tree trunks and rocks like babies!" she laughed, maddeningly. "And since in a way I got ye into this mess, I'll be infinitely gracious and get yer out of it, King Suren, isn't that nice of me?"

"It would be...nice," he grumbled, shifting his feet in the water. Despite her attitude and her lack of perspective, she did at least take good care of her guests.

 

"First," she said sternly, "you eat."

Suren was all too happy to obey. The witch trotted out plate after plate of food--roast beef, plum pudding, hot vegetable soup, fresh bread with rich butter. "Is it good?" she said, and Suren nodded as he shoveled spoonful after spoonful of food into his mouth.

"Have some bread," she said, and Suren reached over. His fingers knocked against something cold and smooth, and he looked up from his soup to see that the loaf of bread had been transformed into a large, round stone. "Well?"

"Well, it's a stone," he said slowly, feeling a little embarrassed. "You turned the bread into a stone."

"Look closer," said the witch, and Suren leaned in, narrowing his eyes. "There you go, majesty, concentrate a little bit. It'll come to ye."

He stared. The surface of the rock was not perfectly smooth, he noticed: there were porous marks on it, and as he moved his head back and forth, the light was not a perfect, polished shine, but somewhat pebbly. Though it didn't necessarily look soft, or fresh, or warm, or any of the things that bread could be called...

"It still feels like bread," he mumbled tentatively, pulling off a glove and running his fingers over the top of the stone. "It has a sort of...bread-like quality to it, if that makes sense."

"Attaboy!" the witch whooped. "It comes across, see? I'm rather impressed. Most people don't get that quite so quick. Here, try some pudding," she giggled excitedly.

Suren glanced down, and scooted away from the table a little. What had been a full pudding was now a large, fat cat, curled up contentedly on his plate. "Wait a second!" he exclaimed. "I was eating that!"

"Oh, don't be squeamish! It isn't a cat," the witch huffed. "That's the point! Don't you see?"

Suren brought his face down close to the cat, who didn't seem to mind. As it rolled over onto its back, exposing its round belly, the light of the candles seemed to resonate in it in a sort of translucent, jelly-ish glow. "So it's pudding," he said, tilting his head. "I can tell that right away. But how do you change it back?"

"Ah, that's the easy part," the witch chuckled. "Touch it. Go on, give it a little pet!"

Skeptically, Suren began to stroke the fur of the cat's belly. With each pass of his hand, the cat (who purred happily) curled tighter together, growing rounder and more gelatinous until it had formed back into the pudding. "Not so difficult, eh?" the witch said, leaning over to scoop some out with her spoon. "Once you recognize the true soul of an object, you can call it forth just by touch."

"But will that work with things like people, too?"

"Of course it will!" the witch said, gesturing with her spoon. "Now, are ye going to eat the rest of that pudding or what?"

 

Suren stayed at the witch's house for a few days longer. In return for her magic lessons, he would do odd jobs around the house: clean up the kitchen, split wood for the fire, arrange the books in her library. Some of the books were mundane, like cookbooks and things, but others were clearly tomes of ancient and modern magic. Some of them she let him read, but the others were in ancient runes that he couldn't make heads or tails of.

It was a fair trade, and the more Suren learned and practiced, the more confident he felt. Ogereth may have decided to wage a war, but he had done so with, magic-wise, the tools of a child. "It certainly won't be a cakewalk," the witch warned him, "for demons are demons, and spears are spears. But getting your soldiers back, aye, that won't be the problem."

Suren came back to the witch's house a few days later with another bundle of wood. "Ma'am," he called, setting the wood by the fire. "Are you in?"

There was no response. He looked in the kitchen, in her bedroom, out back--nothing. "Ma'am?" he called again, concern prickling at the back of his neck. "Where have you gone?"

Slowly he ran his eyes around the room, looking carefully, searching. A test, he thought, and he knelt on the floor to examine the cluttered baubles and sundries of the witch's home.

As he searched, he called to mind everything he knew about the witch. She was sinewy and gnarled, wizened almost, but with a liveliness that impressed him even at her age. If he were to take a wild guess, it'd be particularly fitting for her to transform into something like a snake, perhaps, or an abstract statue, or...

He turned around, his eyes settling on a corner of the room near the door. There was a potted plant there that he couldn't remember if he'd noticed before, looking somewhat like a miniature oak--it was knotted, but tough-looking, and its leaves were split and frazzled in a way that reminded Suren very much of the witch's hair.

He crouched down on the ground to examine it, narrowing his eyes, trying to see the heart that beat inside that object. Though he couldn't say whether or not he saw it, exactly, there seemed to be a kind of pulsing glow, a vitality that a potted plant simply didn't have. This was it. It must be it, or else he'd look very foolish, taking the branches of the plant in his hands.

As he touched it, the branches of the tree lengthened into arms, and the trunk formed into the woman's stout, short body. "Very good!" she chuckled, and crawled out of the terracotta pot. "Yer majesty, I think ye've got it. Now, that kind of a test wasn't so hard, was it?"

"Not at all!" Suren replied, rather proud of himself. "And the next?"

"There is no 'next!'" she said, marching over to the closet door and pulling it open. Suren watched as she hauled out piece after piece of his armor: his chainlink suit, his smooth breastplate polished to a shine, his white helmet with the beautiful blue shine upon the horns. "Yer done, mister. Finished."

"Finished?" he repeated awkwardly, feeling a slight tinge of fear climb up his arms. "Ah--you mean--"

"Time for ye to go home and teach that silly ward of mine a lesson." The witch piled the pieces of armor into Suren's arms, and he hurriedly began to put them on. They were heavy, but comforting, and the fear began to dissipate as he suited up. "Since ye been so helpful around the house, I figured I would polish yer armor, give it a little shine, you see?"

"Thank you," he mumbled from behind his helmet.

"Ah, don't mention it! And don't forget this," she said, placing Suren's pennant firmly into his hands. Though it had been torn and ragged before, it was now whole again, sewn up with bright blue thread. "Don't say I never did anything for yer."

"Certainly! I won't forget this!" Suren said, strapping his sword and scabbard around his waist. "Thank you, ma'am, from the bottom of my heart. When my kingdom is restored," he said proudly, drawing himself up to his full height, "you're welcome in my palace any time you please!"

The witch let out a raucous laugh. "Hah! Well, I may come to visit, yes. If not there, then the demons' kingdom, to pull Ogereth's ear and give him a good talking-to. When you trounce his big blue behind, let him know his nanny's very disappointed in him, will yer?"

And so King Suren began to make the long trek back to his kingdom. Though the clouds roiled in the distant mountains and the silent road stretched out before him, he contented himself with the thought of his newfound magic, and--above all--the idea that Ogereth was nothing more than an overgrown child playing with toys.


End file.
